Lost archive that shows the pitiful poverty of London's Victorian street children taken by photographer who took up their plight

Their boots barely hang together. Their clothes are ragged hand-me-downs. And for most a hot bath is a distant memory.

But in the eyes of these children there is a self-possession and a quiet confidence that belies the appalling circumstances in which they grew up.

These London youngsters lived amid deprivation, violence and squalor that defies imagination today. At the beginning of the last century, thousands existed in abject poverty on streets that are now among the most fashionable and expensive in the capital.

Ragamuffins: Annie, seven, and one-year-old Nellie, sit sad and hungry on sacking outside their house in Spitalfields. They were among ten children born to single mother Annie Daniels. Five of their siblings died in childhood



Barrow boys: Tommy Nail pushes one of his brothers in a make-shift wheelbarrow in the 1890s. The boys' mother died two years later, her death certificate starkly citing the cause as 'exhaustion' 



Barefoot: Nine-year-old Charlie Long (left) lived in a workers' eating-house run by his parents. Adelaide Springett (right) was so ashamed of her tattered boots, she took them off for this 1901 photograph 



Puss 'n' boots: Jeremiah Donovan, six, was nicknamed Dick Whittington because of his pet cat. But the newspaper vendor's son did not find London's streets paved with gold 


Washday: Two children, their toes poking out of their boots, tend a fire in a battered tin brazier to heat buckets and bowls of water in which to scrub clothes. The clean garments would be hung on lines strung across the street 

Today, a one-bedroom flat off the main Commercial Road in Spitalfields will fetch £450,000; two-bedroom apartments go for up to £750,000. Compare that to the earnings in 1901 of a cook in an East End restaurant — working from 7am to 10.30pm Monday to Saturday for £1 a week.

Respectable people did not dare go near these streets. If a horse-drawn cab cut through Spitalfields, dozens of urchins would surround it, baying for pennies.

And if on a Saturday night a gentleman with too much drink inside him should stray into the ‘desperate backstreets’, he would be set upon by ‘gutter-wolves’, the savage muggers who would kill for a pocketful of change. One method was to seize a victim and bend him backwards till his spine snapped.

A familiar face in these hard streets, Horace Warner eventually earned the trust of the people and persuaded the children to sit for his astonishing portraits.

Daily Mail